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Dillon Bergin
I use data to power investigative reporting. That often means interrogating official data sources or compiling new data. Sometimes the new information helps individuals tell their stories on their own terms. Almost always, though, my reporting begins and ends with two questions: Who does the data serve? What does the data conceal?
Work Experience
Senior Journalism Fellow
MuckRock and the Brown Insitute for Media Innovation
Philadelphia, PA
Current - 2021
- Led reporters from five newsrooms in an investigation that revealed areas of the country where hundreds of COVID-19 deaths were likely uncounted in the official toll, while building a database on changing causes of death for every county in the country through special access to the CDC’s mortality API
- Analyzed a dataset of eight million rows of data, interviewed experts, and contributed writing to a project with WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times on Chicago’s air pollution, using new data from over 100 air quality sensors placed across the city
- Wrote quick turn-around news stories, reporting recipes, and contributed to MuckRock’s yearly round-up of FOIA horror stories called “The Foilies”
Investigative Reporter
Searchlight New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM
2021 - 2020
- Planned and led an award-winning series called “Eviction Epidemic,” using court records to dig into New Mexico’s housing crisis
- Scraped, cleaned, and analyzed over 100,000 court records from New Mexico’s electronic court records system to pull the eviction documents that formed the foundation of the “Eviction Epidemic” series
- Reported and fact-checked several longform investigative stories
Fulbright Journalism Grantee
Fulbright Germany
Freiburg, Germany
2020 - 2019
- Lived in a treehouse city with about 70 environmental activists, documenting their struggle to stop deforestation on the edge of Europe’s largest open-pit coal mine
- Interviewed dozens of community members, activists, police, and coal company employees in Germany’s coal region
Research Fellow
Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy
Philadelphia, PA
2019 - 2018
- Conducted interviews and archival research in South Africa for senior thesis on the #FeesMustFall student protest movement
- Presented thesis paper at a public conference hosted by the Andrea Mitchell Center for Democracy
Editorial Intern
Philadelphia Inquirer
Philadelphia, PA
2018 - 2018
- Fact-checked daily op-eds sent to the Inquirer’s editorial board
- Wrote “viewpoints” articles, interviewing Philadelphians across the city about issues like the opioid crisis or patriotism
Education
B.A., Comparative Literature
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA
2019 - 2015
- Awarded Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and Dean’s List honors
- Completed department’s honors program with thesis titled “Writing, Righting, and Rioting: #FeesMustFall in South Africa”
- Studied German literature for one year at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, enrolled directly as a full-time student